Chapter 2

The man was hunched over with his head in his hands. Rosemary, gathering up the bloodied gauze and towels, looked down at him with a pained expression. She didn’t know the details, but the man, who stood far taller than Connor, had spent the entire surgery crouched on the floor like a child, shaking.

He must have carried her through that storm on his back…… Someone precious to him. Maybe his wife. Pity replaced fear, and Rosemary opened the door and went to him, intending to at least hand him something to wipe his face with.

“Sir, the surgery is finished. Your face is in a terrible state, here, why don’t you……”

“How is she……”

The moment Rosemary stepped out, the man looked past her to Connor and asked. He was shaking so badly the words were barely intelligible. Connor cleared his throat.

“The bullet has been successfully removed. The suturing went well too. However, given that the wound is to the neck, the blood loss was severe……”

“Severe?”

D*mn it. I hate moments like this. Connor held the man’s hollow gaze and let out a slow breath before continuing.

“……I can’t make any promises.”

The man swayed at those words as though the storm outside had struck him directly. His trembling hand reached toward the bed where the woman lay, then faltered and dropped before it could reach her. Connor watched him with uneasy eyes as the man began muttering something under his breath, over and over.

“Sir. Please clean yourself up. An unclean body isn’t good for the patient either.”

Rosemary appeared at the right moment. Reading the room, she pressed a damp cloth into the man’s hand. He had been still as a statue, but the mention of the patient seemed to reach him.

He wiped the blood from his face and hands. His hands were still shaking throughout. Rosemary watched him with sympathy, and then, at some point, began studying his face more closely. Something clicked. Her expression shifted to one of shock.

“Please wait here for a moment.”

Rosemary pulled the exhausted Connor out of the examination room. She shut the door behind her and turned to him, wide-eyed.

“Good God! What in the world…… What did I just see!”

“What’s wrong, Rosemary?”

“Brother, the surgery went well, right?”

“Yes. It went fine. Though given that the wound was to the neck……”

He repeated the same thing he’d told the man, and Rosemary stared at him, her face gone white. She lowered her voice, though it was still quite loud.

“Listen to me, Brother. That man is a duke!”

“Wh, what?”

“A duke! Duke Tetias! You know, I used to cut out his pictures and keep them. At first I couldn’t tell because of the state everything was in, but once he wiped his face clean, it was the same face!”

Connor stared at her with a blank, disbelieving expression. A duke. Not just any nobleman, a duke. What reason would a man of that rank have to come to a small provincial clinic at this hour of the night?

Their voices were loud enough to carry easily to the man sitting in the next room. But he never looked away from the woman on the bed.

Rosemary was right. The man was Owen m’Tetias. Not a fallen noble, but the young head of a ducal house that had never lost its luster. He looked nothing like the version of himself that others knew from newspaper photographs and portraits. The man who always wore a perfectly fitted suit now had neither coat nor waistcoat. His only upper garment was a muslin shirt soaked red with blood. He still had proper trousers and leather boots, at least, but the bloodstains reached up to his thighs, testament to how much had poured from her when he carried her here.

Why.

Owen sat hunched in that small country clinic, looking less like the duke of a family said to have everything and more like a vagrant. None of the confidence or pride the world knew him by was visible. Pale and hollow-eyed, he stared at the woman lying still before him and asked himself the same question, again and again, in a dead voice. Why.

Why, back then……

Owen remembered the day he had taken her from Endelden. He had put her in a carriage at a small, run-down inn and brought her home as his wife. That day, he had not doubted for a single moment that everything would go as he intended. It was a moment he had waited for over a very long time. This woman was the final piece of a revenge he had been building for years.

She had carried guilt, and using that guilt to bend her to his will had been effortless. Every moment of crushing her without her knowing the truth had tasted sweet. He had hated her. He had planned to mock her with lies, use her until there was nothing left to use, then reveal everything and end it. That resolve was still vivid in his memory. Yes. Owen m’Tetias had hated Lea Fell. More than anyone. More than his stepmother. More even than Lea’s father, the man who had kidnapped him as a child.

She had been the one to wound him most deeply. And the revenge born from the love of that naive, fragile boy was now the thing making the man he had become tremble with fear. Would it have been different, if things had gone another way, if he had chosen otherwise. He murmured endless variations of the question and closed his eyes.

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Endelden was a small provincial city, some distance from the capital.

A century ago it had been known for its livestock trade. Then mechanical looms replaced the old handlooms, and within five years the region had transformed into an industrial district. It wasn’t especially close to the capital or the port cities, but the roads were good and the location was well connected.

When the newly elected mayor of Endelden cut the business tax on top of that, merchants and investors began pouring in from all over within a decade. They bought up the weed-choked land for next to nothing and started building textile factories one after another. The factories began small, barely more than cottage industries, but they gathered and grew, and once women and girls sat down at the looms in earnest, the district expanded further still.

Workers seeking employment flooded in from across the country. Where there had once been only cottages and two-story houses, small buildings packed in tightly. It wasn’t just buildings, people of every trade followed. A canteen opened to feed the factory workers, and then a butcher and a greengrocer came to supply the canteen, and so it went.

Endelden grew into a city of high expectations. The mayor was re-elected the previous year. In the part of the city farthest from the factories, where the scenery was nicest, a residential quarter took shape, fine houses for factory owners and the mayor himself.

It was to this very Endelden that a twenty-three-year-old woman named Lea Fell had moved, exactly one year ago.

Lea wore her dark, loosely curled hair braided to one side. She had grey eyes and a pale, melancholy look about her. She found a small, shabby room to rent and took a job at a nearby textile factory. The other women at the factory paid the new arrival little attention. Women living alone were common enough, and it was an unspoken rule among them not to ask questions. Everyone had their own story. The workers and factory staff treated Lea as though she had always been there. Not overly warm, not cold either. Among neighbors like these, Lea Fell quietly became one more unremarkable face among the factory women.

A year passed quickly. Lea had arrived in early spring, crunching through half-melted snow, and now she was watching it pile up on the rooftops again.

The summer had burned fierce, and the winter that followed was bitter to match. The cold, dry air cracked the women’s fingernails like broken glass. There were more than five or six textile factories across the Rodopiel bridge, and not one of them provided their workers with hand cream or gloves. The women came in with bleeding hands and worked themselves to the bone regardless. The pay was never equal to the effort, so buying gloves or cream out of their own wages was out of the question.

But even in those hard moments, laughter existed. In fact, those rare flashes of joy, like wildflowers pushing up through a shadowed alley, were the ones that stayed with you, the ones that carried a particular kind of power. Lea had grown used to that life. She had begun to think that perhaps she could end her quiet, modest days here, in Endelden’s shadowed peace.

But that month, the days with snow outnumbered the days without. One evening after her shift, Lea Fell came to understand that as long as she drew breath, she could not always outrun the past she had tried to bury.

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